OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based hard drive. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.


While we were expecting to see uber high results, the Vertex numbers still made us smile. There is no getting around it: the Indilinx barefoot controller is a real beast! While these numbers are slightly lower than the G.Skill Falcon this could easily be attributed to slight variations in the chips or even small tweaks OCZ has done to the 1.3 firmware. In either case we consider the Vertex and Falcon to be tied for first and strongly recommend you do the same as these numbers are just too darn close to call and well within the margin of error.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.

While most OS drives spend most of their times reading and not writing, the write speed of the drive does have a big impact on the stutter issue and how fast the drive feels.


Now this is interesting. Not only is the Vertex slightly better than the Falcon it also produced a much smoother peak and valley looking performance graph, with fewer dips and each of those dips only hitting the low 140s (vs. the Falcons more prevalent highs and lows and thus more dips which all hit in the mid 130s). What ever the reason, be it firmware tweaks or just variances in the chips, the Vertex seems to have a much more refined and polished performance presentation. Needless to say, these numbers destroy all the competition and set the bar even higher than it was before.